Technical analysis of top podcasts

February 4, 2018

What bitrate are some of the most popular podcasts in the world using? And what LUFS value do they run at? We were curious: so, we decided to take a look at the top 100. For more analysis, get our free daily news briefing.

To start, some graphs easily show that the majority of these podcasts are 128kbps and stereo; though there are a fair amount of other bitrates being used - as low as 56kbps, as high as 320kbps. (You can hover over, or touch, the graphs for more information). Many podcasters recommend 96k mono (the equivalent audio quality of 192k stereo) for podcasts that are mostly speech.

In terms of LUFS, the unit of loudness (aka "how loud does this sound"), there’s a wide range. The loudest is -8, while the quietest runs at -28. However, as can be seen above, -16 to -20 is the most popular spot for podcasters. Google recommends -16 LUFS; Amazon -14; and as we reported in January, the BBC is authoring its podcasts at -18 LUFS.

Compiled using the US Apple Podcasts Top 100 podcast list via API on Sunday 4 February 2018, and parsing the iTunes podcast page to retrieve the top listed episode’s audio URL (normally the latest). The audio was downloaded and analysed using ffmpeg’s loudnorm plugin, with dual_mono enabled. Video podcasts or those that were not successfully analysed were discarded. They are sorted in alphabetical order by podcast name. We also added our own podcast in the list for analysis: it is not one of the top 100. Our user-agent for this work was PodnewsBot/1.0.